Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [115]
Patrick Muirhead, an experienced former BBC radio journalist who spent time as the anchorman of Jersey’s nightly ITV news until 2004, described the atmosphere.
“In an island of 90,000 souls, one is only removed from another by the smallest step of separation,” he said. “My co-host’s home became a popular salon for politicians and decision-makers. In such an atmosphere of closeness, any meaningful challenge becomes impossible. ‘You rub people up the wrong way,’ she said, primly dismissing my methods. After I left, my integrity, professional ability and popularity were trashed by a hostile and defensive Jersey media and island population.”5
Unaccountable elites are always irresponsible, and I got my own taste of Jersey’s moldy governance on the very first day of a visit in March 2009, when I bought the Jersey Evening Post and read its front-page story, entitled “States in Shambles.”
“The States resembled a school playground yesterday as foul language and personal insults flew across the chamber,” read the text. Senator Stuart Syvret, a popular but controversial local politician, had complained publicly in the States assembly, Jersey’s parliament, that the health minister was whispering in his ear. Syvret, the newspaper reported, “stood up and said: ‘On a point of order, I am sorry to interrupt the minister. But the minister to my right, Senator Perchard, is saying in my ear “you are full of f*****g s**t, why don’t you go and top yourself, you bastard.” Senator Perchard immediately responded by saying: ‘I absolutely refute that. I am just fed up with this man making allegations.’ The BBC, which was broadcasting the sitting live, had to apologise for the language.”
Syvret has been a regular victim of efforts to suppress dissent. “Any anti-establishment figure here is bugged,” said Syvret.6 “There is a climate of fear. Anyone who dares disagree is anti-Jersey, an enemy of Jersey. You are a traitor, disloyal. There is all this Stalinist propaganda.” A few weeks after my visit, eight police officers arrested him and jailed him for seven hours while they ransacked his home and personal files, including his computer files. The next day Syvret’s blog administrator told him someone had clumsily been trying to hack his passwords. His blog describing his incarceration summed up the atmosphere. “Come to Sunny Jersey. The North Korea of the English Channel!”
In October 2009, having been accused of leaking a police report about the conduct of a nurse, Syvret fled to London and claimed asylum in Britain. He returned in May 2010 to fight an election and was arrested at the airport. Not long afterward, he outlined his views about Jersey plainly.
“It is an utterly lawless jurisdiction. Jersey is an environment under the grip of a wholly criminal regime. So absolute—and absolutely corrupted—is all meaningful power in Jersey that the island possesses less scrutiny and fewer checks and balances than a Balkan state.”7
Corruption could tarnish Jersey’s international reputation. Skittish financiers dislike places that are chaotically corrupt, as do onshore regulators elsewhere. Secrecy jurisdictions steeped in sleaze confront this by putting on a strenuous theater of rectitude that involves repeatedly projecting the essential message that they are clean, well-regulated, transparent, and cooperative jurisdictions—burnished by carefully selected comments and praise from toothless offshore watchdogs like the IMF’s Financial Action Task Force or the